Among the many reasons why anyone would want start a blog, “because you can” may not be the best. However, this is the reason that explains so many blogging situations right down to the lifeline of popular entertainment – it’s open to everyone. Websites like Tumblr, a mix of a blogging platform and a social network, are a very convenient entry point to blogging.
However, once you put that entry point behind you and get serious about blogging, you may soon realize that there is nothing better than having your blog on your own website. So you will be back to WordPress and you might stumble upon this article while looking for ways to migrate your Tumblr blog to WordPress.
Here we are to help you with that! In this article, you will be able to learn about:
There are a few things that make Tumblr a very attractive choice for novice bloggers. Tumblr is a free-to-use blogging platform with great capabilities for publishing multimedia content and a unique social component that’s hard to match.
Above all, Tumblr allows you to connect a custom domain name to your account. You can use both free and premium themes to change how your blog and posts appear on Tumblr. While it is not very easy for regular users to find, there are also limited options for improving your blog’s search engine ranking.
However, if you compare it to WordPress, you’ll soon see that the only real advantage Tumblr has is its social aspect. WordPress beats it in every other way. The content management system allows for unlimited customization through free and premium WordPress themes, not limited to blogging, just like WordPress does. When it comes to SEO, WordPress has a number of free tools to help non-tech savvy users.
And while it’s true that having a WordPress website will cost you some money due to hosting and possibly other services, the peace of mind you get from this is the best possible dodge of Tumblr’s social networking theme. With WordPress you are truly responsible for your website and its content.
Moving from Tumblr to WordPress can be important, so you should prepare the destination well first. This means that before you start migrating your blog from Tumblr to WordPress, you need to do the following:
Once your WordPress website is up and running – it doesn’t need to be open to visitors yet – you can start the migration process.
If you don’t have just a few posts on Tumblr that you can manually move by copying and pasting into WordPress posts, You have two options to migrate content from Tumblr to WordPress. One is to pay for a service that will do this for you. The other is to install a plugin and do it yourself. We will explain how to do the latter.
From the dashboard of your WordPress website, navigate to: Tools > Import. There you will find a Tumblr import tool that you can upload and use to migrate the content. However, you should keep in mind that the importer tool has not been updated for years. You will use it at your own risk.
When you run the importer, it will show you a page with instructions on what to do next. For starters, you’ll have to visit Tumblr. Applications pagewhere you can save an app.
You are free to choose the app name and the admin contact email will default to the email you used to create your Tumblr blog. For app website and default callback URL, it is best to copy your WordPress website URL as provided by Tumblr Importer. Once done, you can access the OAuth Consumer Key as well as the secret key.
You will need to copy these two keys into their respective fields in the Tumblr Importer tool. When you’re done, you can hit the Connect to Tumblr button to connect your Tumblr blog and WordPress website.
After connecting your website to Tumblr, you will need to authorize the app. After that, you’ll finally be able to select the Tumblr blog – if you have multiple links – and assign the author to get the signature for the post. After that, clicking the Import this blog button should activate the action. It may take some time, so be patient.
If you wait for the process to finish, you can find your Tumblr posts below your WordPress posts, images and all with the author you assigned. With this, you’ve gone as far as you can get your blog from Tumblr to WordPress.
Your next step will be to set up redirects to your new WordPress posts for your Tumblr posts. If you don’t have a lot of posts, there’s a pedestrian way of doing this that works best. From your Tumblr page, go to: Settings > Edit Appearance.
From there you should click on the Edit Theme button which will allow you the option to edit your theme’s code. Press Edit HTMLand you will have access to the theme’s code.
In the code, you will need to add the redirect for each post you have on Tumblr, following this pattern:
if(window.location.href.indexOf("---enter post number----") != -1) { window.location.replace("---enter corresponding WordPress link----"); } else if(window.location.href.indexOf("---enter post number---") != -1) { window.location.replace("---enter corresponding WordPress link----"); }
You should place this code between scenario tag and replace post numbers and WordPress links with those on your Tumblr and website. Then, you can put all of this code on your site. Make sure you put it somewhere inside the tag. Feel free to use “else if” to add as many links as you want.
Let’s wrap it up!
When Tumblr’s newness and social networking features start to get old, you may start to see WordPress as the next destination for your blog. You don’t have to worry about the existing content on your Tumblr website – it’s not too complicated to port it all to WordPress, although it can be a bit tedious especially when setting up all the redirects. But if you get over it, there’s no reason why your successful Tumblr blog shouldn’t be a successful WordPress blog.
